William Blake summary

Explore the life of William Blake, poems, and illustrations

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William Blake, watercolour portrait by John Linnell; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

William Blake, (born Nov. 28, 1757, London, Eng.—died Aug. 12, 1827, London), English poet, painter, engraver, and visionary. He was trained as an engraver by James Basire and afterward attended classes at the Royal Academy. Blake married in 1782, and in 1784 he opened a print shop in London. He developed an innovative technique for producing coloured engravings and began producing his own illustrated books of poetry—including Songs of Innocence (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790?), and Songs of Experience (1794)—with his new method of “Illuminated Printing.” Jerusalem (1804[–20?]), an epic treating the fall and redemption of humanity, is his most richly decorated book. His other major works include Vala; or, The Four Zoas (manuscript 1796?–1807?) and Milton (1804[–11?]). A late series of 22 watercolours inspired by the Book of Job includes some of his best-known pictures. He was called mad because he was single-minded and unworldly; he lived on the edge of poverty and died in neglect. His books form one of the most strikingly original and independent bodies of work in the Western cultural tradition. Ignored by the public of his day, he is now regarded as one of the earliest and greatest figures of Romanticism.

English school Summary

English school, dominant school of painting in England throughout the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th. Its establishment marked the rise of a national tradition that began with the emergence of native artists whose works were no longer provincial but rivaled

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Romanticism Summary

Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of

essay Summary

Essay, an analytic, interpretative, or critical literary composition usually much shorter and less systematic and formal than a dissertation or thesis and usually dealing with its subject from a limited and often personal point of view. Some early treatises—such as those of Cicero on the

poetry Summary

Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. (Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.) Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history and